CULTURAL AUTOPSY 8

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

31 October 2004

Hall 1

Cultures and religions appeared to be diametrically opposed in the Balkan War. But what are the actual differences between the people from Croatia and Serbia? And how can someone from Bosnia be a Muslim although he is white? About the heroism of the battlefield and the poetry of war.

Serbian Epics
PAWEL PAWLIKOWSKI (UNITED KINGDOM 1993, VIDEO, 45:00 MIN)
The deconstruction of identity in three stages. First: “the other can not live amongst us just like that”, which amounts to the demand for an abandonment of his specific cultural, national, ethnic, religious, political and other baggage. Second: “the other can not live amongst us”, the consequence of which is expulsion, banishment and other means of purging. Third: “the stranger can not live”, which is for those who are still around after the two previous stages. The last stage only forms the triumphant consequence of the idea that identity is not formed by diversity but by elimination.

Bosnia Hotel
THOMAS BALMES (FRANCE 1996, VIDEO, 52:00 MIN)
When warriors of the Samburu tribe in Kenya served in Bosnia as part of the U.N. peacekeeping forces, they found a world quite different from their pastoral existence in their homeland. They did not understand white man’s civilization, “a place where people blow one another up with explosives without even seeing each other’s faces.”

Johan Grimonprez

― Curator

Johan Grimonprez (Belgium, 1962) studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. Grimonprez's work dances on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of the viewer. Informed by an archaeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our contemporary sublime, framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasises a multiplicity of histories and realities. He achieved international acclaim with his film essay dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, in 1997, which eerily foreshadowed the tragic events of September 11th in New York. His films have been included in prestigious film festivals around the globe, including New York, Edinburgh, Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Berlin.

Archive

Festival 2004